Day 29, Oct 29, 2013. Good morning from McDonalds in Muscle Shoals Alabama. Tif is at work and I am doing my Psalm reading here this morning. We are nearing the end (teleos) of Octobers sojourn thru the Psalter. This mornings lection was Pss 141-144. Sometimes living IN the text for the sake of prayer is a dangerous thing to do. Perhaps that is why we find it so unnerving, unnatural or just something we do not want to do. Our opening psalm performed surgical operations on me this morning. The psalmist desires God and asks that his/her prayer stand as incense before You (141.2). He requests that God place a watch on my mouth, a guard at the door of my lips (v.3). He/She confesses no truck with anti-kingdom living. But then the psalmist gives God dangerous permission to do what is nearly unthinkable Let the righteous man strike me, the faithful rebuke me (v.5). A theme in both Proverbs and Sirach is the wise person seeking discipline or rebuke from our fellow disciples. Here our psalmist places him/herself squarely within the community of faith and trusts not her own knowledge, wisdom or even faith. To LOVE guidance, to SEEK correction, to HUNGER for rebuke is the proof of wisdom and the repudiation of folly. This biblical perspective is the death nail of Modernisms tyranny of the Self - the idolatry of the Autonomous I. This is not making oneself simply a target or martyr but rather submission to the wisdom of the community. The word hesed occurs well over a hundred and fifty times in Psalms and is used right here in this very sentence (according to the MT) ... correction by the community is nothing short of hesed. No shaming. No casting out. But calling those of us who struggle - that is all of us - to something that is greater and bigger than me. No life is worth living, the Psalms seem to confess, that is separate and apart from unity with, fellowship with, solidarity with, and immersion within Gods People. Only Fools Live Apart from the community! But to find refuge with God is to find solidarity with those who call on him as Lord and kneel in adoration before him. As the ending of todays prayer says happy the PEOPLE {plural, community} whose God is the LORD (144.15). I do not like being rebuked and I rarely invite it! Submitting to the community is what we all rebel against. Nothing is more unAmerican than what the Psalms invite us to do. We imagine ourselves being pretty smart, at least smarter than those around us ... the arrogance of individualism is rarely blatantly stated but simply cannot be denied. It is rampant in American spirituality and churches. How can we open up ourselves to wisdom of the community? The exercise of praying the Psalms themselves is a basic fundamental step. Actually reading sympathetically thru the history of the church not in order to prove how wrong some one is but to see how and where God in his grace gave his Spirit to flawed people living in flawed times brought him glory anyway. This previous suggestion requires seeing the Story of God going through the canonical Hebrew Bible thru the work of the early church and going on even today. If God can use Samson, Jepthah, Jeroboam, ... and CYRUS ... then Gods Spirit can and does continue to work in the likes of folks routinely branded as false teachers by Restorationists. Disciples like Clement, Augustine, Luther, William Carey and men like Barton Stone and even Martin Luther King. Karl Barth once said that respecting (not worshiping) the wisdom and tradition of the church is simply a form of obedience to to the commandment to Honor your Parents. I think the psalmist agree. But we can open ourselves us to the wisdom of the community by actually integrating ourselves into our local church family. If the good life, according to Psalms, cannot be lived apart from the People of God then contemporary Evangelicalism, and even Churches of Christ, has a lot of repenting to do. We have often imagined that the local family of God was quite literally superfluous not only to the good life but to having a relationship with God. But our psalm calls us to dare to pray for God to work in the community so the righteous may rebuke/correct me as sign of his own Hesed. As I said sometimes letting Gods Spirit commune with us over the Psalms ... is dangerous!
Posted on: Tue, 29 Oct 2013 14:29:32 +0000